This blog is about The Big Picture - information and insights about what goes on in the world outside our borders - and what it means for Americans. Unless otherwise specified, all photos from Deena Stryker archive.

Saturday, January 23, 2016

To Europe: Forget Bandaids! Be Proactive!

The trials and tribulations of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, billed by Time magazine as the most important person of 2015, have made me despair over the rapidity with which my beloved old continent is falling apart.

Rather than constantly repeating that "Germany is strong, and we can do this" (i.e., take in more refugees), Merkel needs to announce an entirely new European policy: "We will cut ties with the American administration intent on raping the third world, and invest the money in helping those countries get on their feet."

This is easier said than done, but the results of inaction are too dreadful to contemplate: instead of affording its people continuing well-being, the European Union will disintegrate into warring nation-states once again, this tie with a crucial new element: a growing minority of Muslims in what was once the bastion of Christianity.

The Union was founded as a reaction to repeated intra-European strife - mainly between France and Germany. But today France, Germany and the other 26 countries of the EU appear helpless in the face of thousands of non white, non-Christian, foreigners, although these amount to only 1-2% of its population.

In politics, dithering can be fatal, one of the reasons why naive voters are drawn to politicians who present themselves as 'strong men', who will inevitably take advantage of the dithering of democrats (see Hitler and the Weimar Republic). Europe is all the more dramatically caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place that the decisive action required to save itself is all but unthinkable: pruning ties with the United States, its savior in two world wars and its tutor for seventy. Brussels is accused by many Europeans of being dictatorial, however it has not given itself the tools to conduct a foreign policy independent of Washington, which in an interdependent world world crucially impacts the domestic arena.

US tutoring is threatening Europe's survival. The current generation of leaders has imbibed American leadership with its mothers' milk, taught in school that the Yankees liberated them from German occupation, and finally, after an initial period of resentment, utterly seduced by America's version of modernization. Not to mention how much easier it is to follow than to take initiatives. America's successive rescues probably convinced Europe's leaders, from Adenauer and Schumann on, that the fractious peninsula needs a strong, benevolent tutor to keep the peace. It did not occur to them that Europe would eventually pay the price for America's determination to rule the world.

The presence of a seemingly formidable neighbor - the USSR- on its borders, combined with Soviet hegemony over the Eastern half of Europe, sufficed to keep Christian-Democratic/Democratic -Socialist elites alternately in power, guided by American pro-consuls toward the fruits of progress. But insidiously, this was accompanied by the atrophy of European geo-political thought. (Suffice it to remember the widespread European opposition to America's war in Vietnam, compare to its attitude toward the bombing of Yugoslavia or the invasion of Iraq") On a continent of historically rambunctious rulers, only the Communists could be counted upon to warn of paths best not taken - in vain.

Anti-communism will someday be recognized as one of the main factors having contributed to a widening North-South divide, preventing an ever more comfortable Europe from realizing that it could not remain forever aloof from the travails of the South. Remnants of -colonialism - even if in the form of paternalism - led it to participate in adventures in adjacent areas such as the Middle East and Africa led by an America protected by two oceans from blowback.

Instead of seeing the European Union - the second largest economy in the world - as an equal weight to an oil-rich but backward Middle East, and the three giants Russia, China, and India, with which it shares the Eurasian continent, for the first time in its history, Europe took on the role of junior partner with severely limited voting rights.

The failure of Europe’s leaders to assert their authority over foreign affairs, building a better partnership with Arabs and Africans than the disastrous one gifted them by Washington, is fast resulting in reverse colonization

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Welcome to Otherjones!

The alternative press is replete with despair and ‘hope’, neither of which is helpful. ‘Squawking’ may alleviate some of the pain Americans experience at being identified with a government that brutalizes Others at will, but it doesn’t change the ‘facts on the ground’. As for hope, it is an easy cop-out: in the present state of the world, we can never be certain that tomorrow will come. Whether a barefoot child in Africa or a hedge-fund manager, all of us are the potential victims of hubris.

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About Me

Born in Philadelphia, I studied in Paris, became a French citizen by marriage, debuted at Agence France Presse in Rome, then, as Deena Boyer, followed Fellini’s creative process for The Two Hundred Days of ’81/2’. The proceeds from this book enabled me travel to Cuba to to interview Fidel Castro for a major French weekly, meeting with him again a week after the Kennedy assassination and several times in 1964 for a book, Cuba 1964: When the Revolution was Young, in which the other members of the government (including Che Guevara, Raul Castro and Celia Sanchez), tell in their own words why they made the revolution. My Cuba archive is on-line at Duke University.

In the seventies, I did graduate work in Global Survival, taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and was a speech writer in the Carter State Department, publishing an article on U.S.-Soviet relations in the in-house journal in 1976.

Returning to Paris in 1981, with assistance from the Centre National du Livre, I published Une autre Europe, un autre Monde, the only book that foresaw the reunification of Europe and the breakup of the Soviet Union. I returned to Philadel-phia in 2000, and have been a contributor and senior editor at various on-line journals.

A Taoist Politics: The Case for Sacredness hopes to change the way both seekers and skeptics look at good and evil - -and at the daunting problems of the 21st century. It shows that religious belief is not necessary to achieve serenity, but that awareness of the sacred as confirmed by modern science, is. It does this by viewing the world as a system and exploring what that means for the role of politics.

America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World is a primer for Americans and others who find the policies of successive US governments difficult to square with their image of the country and its founding documents. The decades I spent living on both sides of the Iron Curtain provided me with a unique awareness of America’s image abroad and of the mainstream media’s failure to convey news and ideas to the voters in whose name policies are carried out. References to work by other political writers illustrate little-known or forgotten features of American history that have contributed to the tragic face the country presents today.

Cuba 1964 provides the definitive answer to the question: “Was Fidel Castro a Communist before he carried out the revolution, or did he become one because of the way the United States reacted when he ousted pro-US dictator Fulgencio Batista? While following day by day events, I had extensive conversations with the men and women who had joined the Castro brothers as early as 1953 and were now members of the revolutionary government. Together with Fidel, Raul, Che and Celia Sanchez, they told me in their own words why and now they made the Revolution hat continues to inspire countries in Latin America and around the world. The text is illustrated with photographs from my black and white archive which can be seen on-line at Duke University.

Lunch with Fellini Dinner with Fidel: How did it happen that a fourteen year old American girl found herself living among the French in post-war Paris? The answer to that question also explains why I went on to live in half a dozen countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain, becoming mutti-lingual, writing first about the cinema, then about ‘the big picture’ while raising two children, mostly on my own. A religious grandmother and a hedonistic lover accompanied me on a journal which has been both spiritual and political, and is illustrated by many photographs from my personal album.